Reality 2.0
Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls
Join Privacy and Open Source advocates, Doc Searls and Katherine Druckman, as they navigate the new digital world, covering topics related to digital privacy, cybersecurity, digital identity, as well as Linux and open source and other current issues.
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Top 10 Reality 2.0 Episodes
Goodpods has curated a list of the 10 best Reality 2.0 episodes, ranked by the number of listens and likes each episode have garnered from our listeners. If you are listening to Reality 2.0 for the first time, there's no better place to start than with one of these standout episodes. If you are a fan of the show, vote for your favorite Reality 2.0 episode by adding your comments to the episode page.
Episode 143: A Pause on AI?
Reality 2.0
04/11/23 • 44 min
Doc Searls and Katherine Druckman discuss an open letter to pause AI development.
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- Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter - Future of Life Institute
- Elon Musk and others urge AI pause, citing 'risks to society' | Reuters — Elon Musk and a group of artificial intelligence experts and industry executives are calling for a six-month pause in developing systems more powerful than OpenAI's newly launched GPT-4, in an open letter citing potential risks to society.
- AI company harvested billions of Facebook photos for a facial recognition database it sold to police | Salon.com — Artificial intelligence is having a cultural moment. AI-powered chatbots like ChatGPT — and their visual image-creating counterparts like DALL-E — have been in the news lately for fear that they could replace human jobs. Such AI tools work by scraping the data from millions of texts and pictures, refashioning new works by remixing existing ones in intelligent ways that make them seem almost human.
- Microsoft's Bing A.I. is leading to creepy experiences for users — New York Times columnist Kevin Roose wrote on Thursday that when he talked to Sydney, the chatbot seemed like “a moody, manic-depressive teenager who has been trapped, against its will, inside a second-rate search engine.”
Episode 136: Happy New Year!
Reality 2.0
01/11/23 • 46 min
Doc Searls and Katherine Druckman talk about Facebook's recent Irish problems, Google's Performance Max ad product, and digress into discussing the Houston food scene as we welcome back Reality 2.0 for 2023.
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- Data Protection Commission tries to make victory of its U-turn on Facebook and Instagram – The Irish Times — Watchdog forced to toughen its decision on data protection complaint after European intervention
- Data Protection Commission announces conclusion of two inquiries into Meta Ireland | 04/01/2023 | Data Protection Commission — The Data Protection Commission (DPC) has today announced the conclusion of two inquiries into the data processing operations of Meta Platforms Ireland Limited (“Meta Ireland”) in connection with the delivery of its Facebook and Instagram services. (Meta Ireland was previously known as Facebook Ireland Limited).
- Inside Google’s Ad Display Network Black Box: Porn, Piracy, Fraud — ProPublica — Google’s ad business hides nearly all publishers it works with and where billions of ad dollars flow. We uncovered a network containing manga piracy, porn, fraud and disinformation.
- Meet Performance Max, The Blackest Black Box Of All Google Ad Products | AdExchanger — Lost in the Sturm und Drang of Q4 (Q for quarantine) 2020, Google introduced a beta program called Performance Max, its first ad product spanning all Google-owned media.
- GitHub - dmarti/CAPCA: California Advertising Placements on Criminal Activity Act
- LastPass Data Breach: It’s Time to Ditch This Password Manager | WIRED — The password manager’s most recent data breach is so concerning, users need to take immediate steps to protect themselves.
04/22/22 • 62 min
Doc Searls and Katherine Druckman talk to Don Marti about ad tech and its many consequences, as well as recent efforts to reform it.
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Special Guest: Don Marti.
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- IAB Tech Lab — Today, IAB Tech Lab, the digital advertising technical standards-setting body, announced an update to the widely adopted ads.txt specification which they have opened for public comment for 60 days. The update includes two new values for publishers to declare within their ads.txt files, “ownerdomain” and “managerdomain” which helps increase the transparency into seller relationships via sellers.json and further strengthens ads.txt as a tool to reduce fraud in buying and selling of advertisements on websites, mobile apps and connected TV.
- IAB Tech Lab — Real-time Bidding (RTB) is a way of selling media that enables an individual advertising opportunity (ad impression) to be put up for bidding in real-time. OpenRTB is the communication protocol that enables real-time bidding. It was designed to spur growth in RTB marketplaces by providing an open industry standard for communication and interoperability between buyers and sellers in the digital advertising industry.
- banning surveillance advertising — New bill in Congress: the Banning Surveillance Advertising Act of 2022. Ambitious goal. May not get far this Congress, but it’s good to have a destination in mind. As Allison Schiff wrote on AdExchanger, Even If Targeted Online Advertising Isn’t Banned – Take Note Of Which Way The Wind Is Blowing. Remember, it took the EPA 23 years to get to the (almost) Final Step in Phaseout of Leaded Gasoline.
- taxing surveillance marketing — Putting a tax on surveillance marketing is sometimes suggested as a solution to a classic externalities problem—firms benefit from surveillance marketing, but the costs and risks are paid for by the people surveilled. A Pigovian tax is the go-to fix for this situation.
- Europe Is Building a Huge International Facial Recognition System | WIRED UK — Lawmakers advance proposals to let police forces across the EU link their photo databases—which include millions of pictures of people’s faces.
- Microtargeting as Information Warfare — F oreign influence operations are an acknowledged threat to national security. Less understood is the data that enables that influence. This article argues that governments must recognize microtargeting—data informed individualized targeted advertising—and the current advertising economy as enabling and profiting from foreign and domestic information warfare being waged on its citizens. The Department of Defense must place greater emphasis on defending servicemembers’ digital privacy as a national security risk. Without the ability to defend this vulnerable attack space, our adversaries will continue to target it for exploitation.
04/01/22 • 35 min
Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls talk about the Digital Markets Act and Apple's personal finance plans.
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- The Digital Markets Act: ensuring fair and open digital markets | European Commission — The Digital Markets Act (DMA) establishes a set of narrowly defined objective criteria for qualifying a large online platform as a so-called “gatekeeper”. This allows the DMA to remain well targeted to the problem that it aims to tackle as regards large, systemic online platforms.
- Why Alphabet Will Benefit From New European Privacy Rules — European regulators are once again coming after big American technology companies. Some say it is the beginning of the end for them. Not so fast.
- New EU law could spark gold rush of iMessage alternatives — At the moment, getting access to iMessage’s features on non-Apple devices is a complete pain. In fact, getting access to any messaging platform’s features outside of its native apps can range from difficult to almost impossible. Whether it’s Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, or Signal, in every case, the services’ developers want you to stick to their own software to message on their platforms.
- Europe agrees on big new package of tech rules — European regulators have come to an agreement on major competition rules that could force the world's biggest tech platforms, including Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft, to reshape big chunks of their business.
- US consumer views on privacy laws — A July 2021 survey from Data for Progress found that nearly three-quarters (72%) of likely US voters felt that existing privacy laws are insufficient.
- Computer Crime Hype - Schneier on Security — Beware the Four Horsemen of the Information Apocalypse: terrorists, drug dealers, kidnappers, and child pornographers. Seems like you can scare any public into allowing the government to do anything with those four.
- Apple (AAPL) Working to Bring Financial Services Tasks In-House - Bloomberg — The effort, dubbed ‘Breakout,’ would replace fintech partners
- Wordle Hacking—Suddenly Wordle Is Tracking You, Here’s How To Stop It — Perhaps what will come as some surprise to many players of the game is that it now comes complete with ad-trackers. But don't sweat it, you can stop it with a little Wordle hacking.
02/04/22 • 36 min
Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls talk to Petros Koutoupis about how big tech navigates the ad tech landscape, for better or worse.
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- Subprime Attention Crisis: Advertising and the Time Bomb at the Heart of the Internet (FSG Originals x Logic): Hwang, Tim: 9780374538651: Amazon.com: Books — In Subprime Attention Crisis, Tim Hwang investigates the way big tech financializes attention. In the process, he shows us how digital advertising―the beating heart of the internet―is at risk of collapsing, and that its potential demise bears an uncanny resemblance to the housing crisis of 2008.
- Amazon has a $31 billion a year advertising business — Amazon revealed Thursday just how big its advertising business has become. It generated $31.2 billion in revenue in 2021, with fourth-quarter sales rising 32%, according to the retailer’s fourth-quarter earnings statement.
- Facebook and Google stocks have diverged, and the reason is Apple — Facebook’s apps rely almost entirely on Apple and Google for distribution. So when Apple changed its privacy policy last year, limiting the ability of app developers to target users, Facebook was suddenly stripped of one of its most important assets.
- A public apology - on screwing up by not questioning assumptions - my talk at #BIF10 - Ethan Zuckerman — About a month ago, I wrote an article about a simple idea. I asked whether anyone really believed that advertising should be the main way we supported content and services on the internet. Given how poorly banner advertising on the web worksGiven that nobody likes banner ads, and given that the current system puts users under surveillance, which in turn seems to inure us to government surveillance, I wondered whether there might be a better way.
- Doc Searls Weblog · Apple vs (or plus) Adtech, Part I — If you haven’t seen it yet, watch Apple’s Privacy on iPhone | tracked ad. In it a guy named Felix (that’s him, above) goes from a coffee shop to a waiting room somewhere, accumulating a vast herd of hangers-on along the way. The herd represents trackers in his phone, all crowding his personal space while gathering private information about him. The sound track is “Mind Your Own Business,” by Delta 5.
- Fighting FLoC and Fighting Monopoly Are Fully Compatible | Electronic Frontier Foundation — Are tech giants really damned if they do and damned if they don’t (protect our privacy)?
- Facebook says Apple iOS privacy change will cost $10 billion this year — Facebook said on Wednesday that Apple’s App Tracking Transparency feature would decrease the company’s 2022 sales by about $10 billion.
- Google Drops FLoC...
Episode 95: What Was Web 2.0?
Reality 2.0
01/14/22 • 27 min
Doc Searls and Katherine Druckman talk to Petros Koutoupis about Air Tags and the generations of the web.
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- Byway FAQ – Customer Commons — The Intention Byway—or Byway for short—is a way to move messages of intent between customers and companies, buyers and sellers, demand and supply, anywhere in any value chain or among a collection of participants. Its goal is to maximize the quality and volume of economic signaling by everyone and to expand the range of economic activity that can take place in a networked marketplace.
- Moxie Marlinspike >> Blog >> My first impressions of web3 — Despite considering myself a cryptographer, I have not found myself particularly drawn to “crypto.” I don’t think I’ve ever actually said the words “get off my lawn,” but I’m much more likely to click on Pepperidge Farm Remembers flavored memes about how “crypto” used to mean “cryptography” than I am the latest NFT drop. Also – cards on the table here – I don’t share the same generational excitement for moving all aspects of life into an instrumented economy. Even strictly on the technological level, though, I haven’t yet managed to become a believer. So given all of the recent attention into what is now being called web3, I decided to explore some of what has been happening in that space more thoroughly to see what I may be missing.
- Matt Mullenweg on Twitter: "People seem to be redefining Web 2.0 as Facebook, etc, that own data, but Web 2.0 at the time was platforms like WordPress, Odeo, Six Apart, Flickr, Technorati, and https://t.co/vlhR5g6fkg that had open data and interoperated. https://t.co/PXuZBaLbP2 https://t.co/sJJT8kyaJG" / Twitter
- What Is Web 2.0 - O'Reilly Media — The concept of "Web 2.0" began with a conference brainstorming session between O'Reilly and MediaLive International. Dale Dougherty, web pioneer and O'Reilly VP, noted that far from having "crashed", the web was more important than ever, with exciting new applications and sites popping up with surprising regularity. What's more, the companies that had survived the collapse seemed to have some things in common. Could it be that the dot-com collapse marked some kind of turning point for the web, such that a call to action such as "Web 2.0" might make sense? We agreed that it did, and so the Web 2.0 Conference was born.
- Apple AirTags being used to track cars and stalk victims, police warn — The Apple AirTag is a device created to help people keep track of their misplaced items. But the seemingly harmless tool is being used by some to track people and commit car thefts. As authorities investigate these incidents, the devices are raising privacy and security concerns.
08/27/21 • 55 min
Tune in to our new episode! Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls talk to Bill Wendel and Joyce Searls about where tech meets real estate, and how intentcasting could improve the market.
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- Real Estate Cafe | Serving a Money-saving Menu of Services since 1995
- Real Estate Cafe / reVRM Minifesto — Idea starters to kick-start conversation about VRM's potential role in the residential real estate industry
- Ralph Nader on Twitter: "Absentee giant corporate control over local America expands relentlessly. Latest are huge firms like Blackrock buying hundreds of thousands of houses for speculation purposes. Fight absentee corporatist domination. Support the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. @ilsr -R" / Twitter
- Pacaso Is Turning Houses Into Corporations : Planet Money : NPR — On a sleepy cul-de-sac amid the bucolic vineyards and grassy hills of California's Sonoma Valley, a $4 million house has become the epicenter of a summer-long spat between angry neighbors and a new venture capital-backed startup buying up homes around the nation. The company is called Pacaso. It says it's the fastest company in American history to achieve the "unicorn" status of a billion-dollar valuation — but its quarrels in wine country, one of the first regions where it's begun operations, foreshadow business troubles ahead.
- Bill Wendel on Twitter: "Stats below reveal need to replace Active MLS listings with new metric - owners who #Intend2Sell or #IntentionInventory DEC = good month for price reductions, expired listings & to interact #P2P w/ owners planning #LifeTransition in 2022 DM re #ProactHH https://t.co/Tgvjs9S6nM https://t.co/1KkusoNPpz" / Twitter — #BidWarBacklash: 20 yrs ago, Feds report "Housing Starting to Weaken“ cautioned: "Housing values dropped 8% on average during last recession in 1991. Not only could it happen again, ..it could 'happen rather abruptly.'" Instead of bidding #100KoverAsk, willing to #TimeREMarket?
- In Case You Were Unclear What the US Government Thinks of NAR... - NotoriousROB — In light of yet another intervention in a private lawsuit by the Department of Justice, this time in the REX v. Zillow case, a few things should be clearer. One, the Department of Justice really doesn’t like it when NAR uses the 2008 Consent Decree as any kind of a shield for any kind of a rule. NAR has done this in Moehrl, in Sitzer, and now in REX and in all three instances, the DOJ went out of its way to file a Statement of Interest telling the judge that the DOJ in no way shape or form approved any NAR rule or policy.
- Instant Buyer - Wikipedia — Instant Buyer (or iBuyer) is a real estate transaction model wherein companies purchase residential properties directly from private sellers, to eventually re-sell them.[1][2]
08/13/21 • 55 min
Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls talk to Kyle Rankin about Apple’s new plans to monitor personal devices, and what it means for privacy, ownership, and setting precedence.
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Special Guest: Kyle Rankin.
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- Apple's Plan to "Think Different" About Encryption Opens a Backdoor to Your Private Life | Electronic Frontier Foundation — Apple has announced impending changes to its operating systems that include new “protections for children” features in iCloud and iMessage. If you’ve spent any time following the Crypto Wars, you know what this means: Apple is planning to build a backdoor into its data storage system and its messaging system.
- Daring Fireball: Apple’s New ‘Child Safety’ Initiatives, and the Slippery Slope — My first advice is to read Apple’s own high-level description of the features, which ends with links to detailed technical documentation regarding the encryption and techniques Apple is employing in the implementations, and “technical assessments” from three leading researchers in cryptography and computer vision.
- Eva on Twitter: "Apple distributed this internal memo this morning, dismissing their critics as "the screeching voices of the minority." I will never stop screeching about the importance of privacy, security, or civil liberties. And neither should you. https://t.co/lLDfxEUIXL" / Twitter — Apple distributed this internal memo this morning, dismissing their critics as "the screeching voices of the minority." I will never stop screeching about the importance of privacy, security, or civil liberties. And neither should you.
- GitHub - nadimkobeissi/appleprivacyletter: An open letter against Apple's new privacy-invasive client-side content scanning. — An open letter against Apple's new privacy-invasive client-side content scanning technology.
- Transactional analysis - Wikipedia — Transactional analysis (TA) is a psychoanalytic theory and method of therapy wherein social transactions are analyzed to determine the ego state of the communicator (whether parent-like, childlike, or adult-like) as a basis for understanding behavior.[1] In transactional analysis, the communicator is taught to alter the ego state as a way to solve emotional problems. The method deviates from Freudian psychoanalysis which focuses on increasing awareness of the contents of subconsciously held ideas. Eric Berne developed the concept and paradigm of transactional analysis in the late 1950s.[2]
- Reality 2.0 Episode 80: NSO Group's Pegasus, Stingrays, and Grindr — Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls talk to Kyle Rankin about NSO group and Pegasus, Stingrays and cars, and surveilling priests.
- The Encryption Debate in Australia: 2021 Update - Carnegie Endowment for International Peace — In 2018, the heads of Australia’s law enforcement and intelligence agencies were given broad powers by the Telecommunications and Other Legislation Amendment (Assistance and Access) Act 2018,1 or TOLA Act, to gain access to encrypted communicat
- Internet of Snitches – Purism — Imagine an Internet of Snitches, each scanning whatever data they have...
08/06/21 • 52 min
Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls talk to Shawn Powers and Petros Koutoupis about how we make our personal spaces better for work and play.
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- My Big Round World – Everyone's a square...
- Pet Sematary (1989) - IMDb — After tragedy strikes, a grieving father discovers an ancient burial ground behind his home with the power to raise the dead.
- Sony Alpha 7R Review: Digital Photography Review — If there's one thing you can say about Sony's digital camera business, it's that they've experimented with many different concepts. From SLRs with dual autofocus systems and Translucent Mirror Technology to its NEX mirrorless line-up, Sony has gone down virtually every avenue in digital imaging. Its latest products - the Alpha 7 and Alpha 7R - may be the most exciting products to come out of the Sony labs in some time. The company has managed to create full-frame cameras which are about the same size as the Olympus OM-D E-M1. In other words, the Alpha 7s are much smaller than their full-frame interchangeable lens peers (such as Nikon's D610 and the Canon EOS 6D), an achievement made possible primarily because they're not SLRs.
- Sony a6400 review: Digital Photography Review — Sony's a6400 is a compact 24MP mirrorless interchangeable lens camera with an APS-C sensor that will serve plenty of photographers from family documentarians to pro shooters looking for a lightweight second body. The big news is that it has a new processor based on that used in Sony's sports-shooting flagship a9 which enables 'Real-Time Tracking' autofocus, which is one of the most effective autofocus implementations we've yet seen. It's also among the easiest to use, once you've gotten it set up.
- Amazon.com: Electro-Voice RE20 Broadcast Announcer Microphone with Variable-D: Musical Instruments
- X2U - Microphone to USB Adapter
- Cam Link 4K | elgato.com
- Key Light Air | elgato.com
- Watch Free Movies Online Now | Stream Free TV with Plex
- 4K UHD Hisense Roku TV with HDR (2020) (55R6G) - Hisense USA
- Aeron - Office Chairs - Herman Miller
- Swopper Active Stool Archives | Ergify
- 18 Best Ergonomic Office Chairs 2021 | The Strategist — Whether you’re working from home at a DIY desk setup or commuting to an office, you may have begun to feel the strain that sitting for seven or more hours a day can put on a body. If said strain has led you to wonder whether it’s worth investing in a better, more ergonomic office chair, the answer is almost certainly yes, according to expert...
05/05/23 • 56 min
Doc Searls and Katherine Druckman talk to Kyle Rankin about a proposal for authenticating content with cryptographic signing, and saving the internet.
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- LLMs break the internet. Signing everything fixes it. — LLMs break the internet. The going rate for GPT-4 is $0.06 per 1000 tokens, or about $0.00008 per word. New open source models like Dolly and StableLM will drop costs even further, and without the content restrictions. Thought has never been so cheap. Creative expression has never been so accessible. Also spam, phishing, harassment mobs, and mass influence ops have never been so cheap, so accessible. You thought the internet was a mess before? Get ready for bots that beat the Turing test, synthesize your voice, generate fake social consensus at scale. We’re seeing the beginnings of this already. Expect a tidal wave of spam, identity theft, phishing, ransomware over the next 36 months.
- See the websites that make AI bots like ChatGPT sound so smart - Washington Post — AI chatbots have exploded in popularity over the past four months, stunning the public with their awesome abilities, from writing sophisticated term papers to holding unnervingly lucid conversations. Chatbots cannot think like humans: They do not actually understand what they say. They can mimic human speech because the artificial intelligence that powers them has ingested a gargantuan amount of text, mostly scraped from the internet.
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FAQ
How many episodes does Reality 2.0 have?
Reality 2.0 currently has 156 episodes available.
What topics does Reality 2.0 cover?
The podcast is about Open Source, Security, Infosec, Podcasts, Technology, Privacy, Linux and Cybersecurity.
What is the most popular episode on Reality 2.0?
The episode title 'Episode 156: AI: The New Tool for Individual Empowerment?' is the most popular.
What is the average episode length on Reality 2.0?
The average episode length on Reality 2.0 is 53 minutes.
How often are episodes of Reality 2.0 released?
Episodes of Reality 2.0 are typically released every 7 days.
When was the first episode of Reality 2.0?
The first episode of Reality 2.0 was released on Oct 4, 2018.
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